Chapter 35
They had been there forty minutes when the car came.
It was a dark sedan, unremarkable, the kind of car a man drives when he does not want to be remembered. It parked at the far end of the gravel drive and a single figure got out.
Vittorio Moretti walked up the path alone.
He did not look around. He walked the way a man walks in his own garden, unhurried, hands loose at his sides, and he stopped at the foot of his sister-in-law’s grave and stood there with his back to the trees.
For a while he did not move at all.
Then he spoke.
“You know,” he said, to the stone, “I do miss her. I know you won’t believe that.”
Dante stepped out from behind the elms.
“I believe it,” he said.
Vittorio did not turn.
“Of course you do. You always were the sentimental one.” He put his hands in his pockets. “How many men did you bring?”
“Enough.”
“There are never enough.” Vittorio turned around. In the gray light he looked older than he had in the boathouse — the silver at his temples, the lines around his mouth, the particular hollowness of a man who has slept badly for a very long time. “I thought you might come here. It’s what I would have done.”
“You said you’d give me a long life.”
“I meant it.”
“You sent men to a boathouse to shoot me.”
“I sent men to a boathouse to make a point.” Vittorio’s voice was mild. “They were instructed not to hit anyone. If they had been instructed otherwise, nephew, you would not be standing here. I have had fourteen years to prepare for this conversation, and I have never once needed to kill you.”
“Until now.”
Vittorio looked at him.
“Until now,” he agreed.
They stood facing each other across the grave, and the rain began, thin and cold, and neither of them moved.
“You’re going to give me the ledger,” Vittorio said. “Or you’re going to give me a reason not to spend the rest of my life taking your life apart. Those are the only two options on this table.”
“No,” Dante said. “There’s a third.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to read it.”
Vittorio’s face did not change, but something behind it went still.
“You’re bluffing.”
“I have it with me.”
“You wouldn’t read it here. You wouldn’t read it at all. It implicates your father. It implicates the family. It implicates the company your mother spent her life protecting.” Vittorio took a step closer. “You’d burn it before you’d read it in public, because you know what it would do to everything you’ve built.”